Altaro Software V6 to Take Backup and Restore HyperV VMware VMs

Altaro released newest version (V6) of their virtual machine backup solution. Altaro v6 supports backup and restore of VMware and Hyper-v based virtual machines. Altaro is free for 2 virtual machine (no time limit). You can download and try 30 days trail version from here. The installation of Altaro is very simple and it took merely 5 minutes to complete the installation. First time configuration of Altaro took me another 10 minutes. Altaro VM Backup has very responsive UI – easy to install, configure and operate. In this post, we will see how to easy to take backup of Virtual Machines using Altaro and also how easy to restore the deleted Hyper-v VMs !!

Error reporting of Altaro VM backup is also very nice. Initially, I configured VMs backup location as 8 GB USB drive. The backup of VMs got failed because there was not enough disk space. Altaro application provides a notification alert for the backup failure. The alert was clear and mentioned that the reason for the error and how to rectify the error in VM backup. Most important and useful stuff is Altaro VM backup provides live chat with support person option with error notification!!In this case, I changed the backup location to hard drive itself so that we have enough disk space. After changing the backup configuration of Altaro VM Backup, we need to save the configuration if at all you forget to save the changes, the application won’t allow you to jump in to next page without reminding you to save. This is also nice feature as I forgot to save the changes couple of times and UI reminded me to do so.

Really nice and real time Dashboard representation of backup status and Altaro gives option to abort the Hyper-V backups if we want to do it because of any reason. You can abort the Hyper-V backup from Altaro Dashboard itself.

Really nice graphical representation of Altaro dashboards help us to verify and confirm the success and other dynamics of the backup process very easily. The following dashboard shows how much time it took to take the backup of 2 VMs and what is the size of disk space used etc..

I took the backup of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper V VMs. To check/test the Altaro VM backup’s restore option, I deleted the Windows 10 Hyper-V VM from the console. There are couple of restore options in Altaro VM backup solution. 1. Full Restore 2. Granular Restore. I tried Full restore of the VM as I deleted all the VHD and configuration files of Windows 10 VM as mentioned above. In the Altaro Virtual machine restore wizard, I did choose the local Hyper-V host as the restore location. and 2nd step is to select the Hyper-V machine which I wanted to restore, in my case it’s Windows 10 machine.In this next screen of Altaro VM backup restore Wizard “Where to Restore”, I selected the default name of the Hyper-V VM “ACNCMWin10-Clone-” and it gave me an option to restore this VM to another host !! I also got an option to customize the VM restore location to store the files of restored VMs. Altaro gives loads of options to customize the backup and restore!! Altaro VM backup solution is highly customizable.

Dashboard gives you an real time activities of the restore operation. Restoration percentage, restoring files etc.. are very nice information.

Altaro VM backup provides nice and handy reports within the application. You can see the operations reports to check whether everything is going well with the scheduled backup and restore etc.. also it gives nice options to understand whether failed VMs are part of Hyper-v or VMware server farm or not. Operation type, Operation time, Host, Duration, Transfer size and Details are also very useful.

As you can see in the following screen shot, my Windows 10 VM is up and running exactly in the same state as before. Altaro VM backup provide a real great and hassle free experience to take backup and restore the Hyper-V or VMware VMs with in very short time period. These operation never required IT skills at all 🙂

Anoop is Microsoft MVP and Veeam Vanguard ! He is a Solution Architect on enterprise client management with more than 16 years of experience (calculation done on the year 2014) in IT. He is Blogger, Speaker and Local User Group Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012,Current Branch, Intune. He writes about the technologies like SCCM, SCOM, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, RMS, Hyper-V etc...

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Hi, I’m Anoop C Nair. I’m the person behind this website. Thank you for visiting the website and about me page! My website is all about Microsoft technologies. More about ConfigMgr (a.k.a SCCM), Intune, Mobile Device Management and all other technologies which are interesting for me. Read more about me here